Saying Grace (10 page)

There was a pause. “Did you want to talk to my wife?” Oliver said.

“Has Lyndie told you about their meeting with Rue?”

There was another pause, and then a clunk, as if the phone had 66 / Beth Gutcheon

fallen on the floor. When he came back on the line, Oliver Sale said,

“What did you say your name was again?”

Emily told him. “I’m a single mother,” she said, wondering if she’d ever get used to saying that. “It’s hard to discipline when you’re on your own. I thought it would make an impression if we made some kind of united front.”

“I’ll tell Sondra you called,” said Oliver. “Maybe she knows something about this.”

Emily got off the phone and decided to finish the bottle of wine.

Tomorrow she was going to have to listen to the most painful wailing about how unfair she was, and how Lyndie’s mom and Jennifer’s mom were on their side and why was she such a bitch? Malone would have learned a valuable lesson from this whole episode. That unkindness is unacceptable? No. That actions have consequences?

No. That her mother is a bitch. Thank you, Mrs. Lowen and Mr. Sale, and the horses you came in on.

I
t was Sunday morning, the second weekend in October.

There had been a strange warm wind all night, so that Henry had gotten up in the middle of the night to turn on the air conditioner.

Now in the cool, gray hum of morning, Rue and Henry had slept past nine.

Rue woke slowly, feeling as if she could go on sleeping forever, watching the movie inside her eyelids.

Henry was awake, she could tell, because he was lying on his back, but he wasn’t snoring. She rolled over and wrapped an arm across his chest, and he made a shoulder for her head.

“I had strange dreams,” Henry said with his eyes closed, as if he were still having them.

“Mine weren’t strange at all. I dreamed we were taking Henry Kissinger kayaking.”

“Really? How did that work out?”

“He liked it because he thought the kayak and his life vest were bulletproof.”

Henry laughed.

“What were your dreams?”

“Oh—they’re mostly gone—no wait. You and I were living in Maryland, on the shore, and my father was alive, and we had a puppy.”

“Did we? What kind?” Rue had always wanted a dog, but Henry and Georgia were both allergic to animals.

“It was one of those ones that are all fur, with little legs sticking out. Maybe a collie. You know what I mean. Well it looked like an ostrich.”

Rue laughed, a gravelly belly laugh.

“Did you like it?”

“Oh,” he said, “I
loved
it. Now I’m sad.”

68 / Beth Gutcheon

“Maybe we could get a poodle. People aren’t supposed to be allergic to those.”

“Don’t they yap?”

“Not big ones. Or a manx.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s a cat that behaves like a dog. It has no tail, and its back legs are longer than the front ones so it looks like a bobcat.”

“Or a stock car.”

“Yes, or a stock car. You could paint your numbers on its sides.”

She rolled over onto her side, and he fitted himself against her back, with an arm around her. They lay together, at peace and drifting.

After a while Henry said, “I want to go back to sleep, but I can’t, I’m too hungry.”

Rue took his hand, which was curled around under her chin, and kissed it.

“Would you like breakfast in bed?”

“I would. You’re a saint.”

“It’s a well-known fact,” said Rue, and slid out of bed. Behind her, as she put on her bathrobe, Henry took her pillows and mounded them up with his own, and rolled onto his back and prepared to snore.

The house was warm and still outside the artificially cool bedroom.

Rue padded barefoot down to the kitchen to put the kettle on. Then she went outside to get the Sunday papers. The
New York Times
, which she rarely had time to read, arrived on Saturday night wrapped in bright blue plastic. It lay on the doormat on the Plums’

front porch, overhung with Victorian gingerbread. The Santa Barbara paper was down on the brick path. Beyond, in the front garden that faced across the lawn toward school, were the beds of roses Rue had begun to plant when she learned she would have no more children after Georgia. Soon it would be time to dress them for winter.

Rue picked up the papers and went back into the front hall. They took both papers because Rue liked the
New York Times Book Review
, but Georgia liked the local funnies and Ann Landers. Rue wondered if Georgia read the paper in New York. It was lunchtime, her time, if she was up. Rue opened the Santa Barbara paper to look at the headlines, and in the kitchen the phone rang.

Saying Grace / 69

The kettle began to whistle as well, as she answered the phone.

“Hello!” said the familiar voice, overly loud as if not trusting he could be heard so far away.

“Dad—Good morning! Can you wait a minute?”

When she came back, he said, “I’ve been trying to call you.”

“I’m sorry—have you? We had to turn the air conditioner on. It’s hot here. I forgot that when it’s on I can’t hear the phone ring.”

She didn’t like to have a phone in the bedroom, because people from school called at all hours. When Georgia was out at night they kept the door open until she came in, so they could hear either the phone or her return. When Georgia was in, the phone was usually for her anyway.

“It’s quite cool here,” said Jack.

“Is it?”

“Yuh.” The way he said it, it had two syllables. “I hauled my boat this weekend.”

“Did you. So early?”

“Yes, I did. It’s been cool, and it’s been wet. And my sailing pals are getting to where they say they can’t get in and out of rowboats.

I threatened to put a derrick on the float to lift them in and out….”

Rue laughed. But she knew her father hated the telephone. If he’d been calling since earlier this morning, it wasn’t to chat.

“So—how is everything?” she asked.

“Fine, everything’s fine.” There was a pause. “Your mother’s had a little shock.” He said this lightly. Rue took a deep breath, knowing he hated fuss, and that shock meant stroke.

“I see. When?”

“Oh—I guess it was about Friday night. She had an awful headache, and when she woke up in the morning, she said she couldn’t see so good. So I took her over to Ellsworth.”

Rue knew they would both hate this. That meant a forty-minute drive for her father each way and doctors who didn’t know them.

There had been a hospital in the next town all their lives, but it had closed. It was said to be inefficient to duplicate expensive equipment, keeping two hospitals in the one county.

“Is she still there?”

“Yuh. They did some tests of some kind, said they’d know something Monday.”

70 / Beth Gutcheon

So he was alone in the house. She doubted he’d slept a night alone in that house in forty years. He was clearheaded and resourceful, but she didn’t like to think of it.

“Daddy, do you want me to come?”

“No, no. No need for that. I just wanted you to know.”

“Thank you—how did she seem after the tests?”

“Well—a little confused…she didn’t sleep very well. She can’t find some words she wants when she tries to talk.”

“Is there any paralysis?”

“Doesn’t seem so. Did I tell you about when Howard Schwarz had his shock?”

Howard was a banker who had retired to farm on the little neck of land on the coast of Maine where her father grew up. He called his farm Schwarzcroft. Howard was smart and kind and very good with sheep, and he and her father were good friends.

“I don’t think so—tell me.”

“His daughter came to the hospital and Howard couldn’t talk for two days. Then he could say a few things, but they couldn’t tell if he didn’t know the answer to things or if he just couldn’t get the words out. So Kate set to asking him questions. She asked him what his name was, and he knew that. She asked him where he lived, and he knew that. So she said ‘Dad, do you know what religion you are?’

“And Howard, he chewed at it and then he said ‘I’m a…Jerk.’”

Rue’s father laughed, and Rue laughed, because no one would have thought this was funnier than Howard.

“I said to Kate, ‘You know, he is kind of a jerk.’ She laughed.”

“Is Howard all right?”

“Howard? Oh, yes he’s fine. Got all his lambs slaughtered. He’s flushing the ewes, getting ready for breeding. I heard he killed a coyote in one of his pens, but I haven’t seen him to ask about it.”

“Give him my best, please, Daddy, when you see him. And Velma.”

“I will.”

There was a little silence. “Dad—would you like Georgia to come?

She’s right there in New York. She could be there tonight.”

“No, no, that’s not necessary.”

Another pause.

“What are you going to do the rest of today?”

Saying Grace / 71

“I’m going over to Ellsworth in an hour or two.”

“And when you get back?”

“I’ll probably have my supper over there, and when I get back I’ll go to bed.”

Rue smiled to herself. She always thought that if everyone were as literal and direct as her father, the world would be a simpler place and a good deal more amusing.

“And tomorrow, you’ll get some results?”

“They say so. Then we’ll know where we are.”

“Will you call me as soon as you do know?”

“I won’t call you from the hospital. I’ll call you when I get home.”

She understood that he meant he might want to say to her more than he wanted her mother to hear, and it wouldn’t occur to him to use a pay phone in the hospital hallway.

“Does Mother have a phone in her room?”

“She does.” He gave her the number, and the doctor’s name and number.

“Give her our love, Dad. And I’m going to let Georgia know, just in case. You might just feel like having some company, or some help with the driving.”

“No need,” he said. But she knew he actually would love it, should Georgia just appear. At least she knew
she
would love it. After she said good-bye, she made a breakfast tray and carried it up the stairs.

In the bedroom, she opened the blinds and got carefully back into bed with Henry, who returned half the pillows to her side of bed, sat up, and said what he always said: “This looks great.” Before she told him about the phone call, she sat in the sun, looking at the exposed surface of the half grapefruit, halved. It was glistening full of clear pink juice.

“If you could take a picture of health, wouldn’t it look like that?”

she asked Henry.

“If I say yes, do we have to go on a grapefruit diet?”

She laughed. “No, I was just wondering how many years we have, to feel really well, and have all our marbles….”

“Are you hoping for a lot? Or for quick oblivion?”

“A lot. My parents have never been really happy, and now they’re starting to die.”

“I think your father is happy.”

72 / Beth Gutcheon

“He’s content, because he has a talent for it. But it hasn’t been a happy marriage. It hasn’t been the kind of marriage where you bring out the best in each other….”

She told him about her father’s phone call. Henry said he would call the hospital in Ellsworth in the morning, and make sure everything needful was being done. Rue thanked him.

“So how many Sunday mornings do we have together, before we need diapers and everything?”

Henry looked thoughtful and then said, “Eighteen hundred and twenty.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

Rue squeezed grapefruit juice onto her spoon and drank it. “It’s nice to have a doctor in the house who knows these things. Did you subtract the Sundays when you go duck hunting?”

“Oh…seventeen hundred and eighty-five, then.”

“I hope that will be enough.”

“I’m worried we’ll run out of this good jam before then.”

“There will be Sundays when we’ll be downstairs cooking pancakes for our grandchildren.”

“The little nippers. And they’ll get butter on the funny papers….”

“And knock over the maple syrup.”

“And we’ll get to poke them and play with them as long as it’s fun, and then we’ll make Georgia take them away.”

“You’ll have to fix that log swing in the back before they get here.”

“I will.”

Henry reached across Rue to co-opt the magazine section. Rue poured out hot tea and put on her glasses.

I
t was two weeks later, mid-October, when a sharp-shinned hawk appeared on campus and began eating the little birds that Catherine Trainer cherished to the point of fetishism. She noticed the hawk at once, circling high in the sky and then turning sharply to dive. She almost screamed as she saw it intercept and stick its sharp talons into some helpless little oriole. She fancied it was an oriole; it was really too far away to see. Perhaps it was a robin. At first she thought the hawk would go away. Sharp-shinned hawks were growing rarer, and they usually hunted in forests, not in open areas.

It did not go away, however. Soon the population of local song-birds and doves was frightened into silence. Even the escaped pair of African gray parrots that usually lived in the school’s live oaks disappeared, although they were themselves too large and well armed for the hawk to eat. Catherine Trainer was beginning to feel overwrought at the situation. What if the hawk ate her lazuli bunting? That is, if it was a lazuli bunting, and if it ever came back? What if she had waited three weeks for another glimpse of the tiny technicolor handful of feathers, with its loud sweet jumble of
chips
and
pits
, and it chose this moment to return to her, and the
hawk ate it?

That was what was going on in Catherine’s life the day Lyndie Sale showed up at school with a broken arm.

Lyndie came into class as the bell was ringing. She had a yellowish bruise on her cheekbone, and she looked unkempt. Her hair needed a good brushing, and her clothes were the same she had worn the day before, looking as if she might have slept in them.

Lyndie took her seat in the back of the room.

“We are having a pop quiz this morning,” Catherine announced, and everyone groaned. Catherine had found a copy of a test she had given on California missions several years before, and decided it 74 / Beth Gutcheon